Book Review: Valentine

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In my book review of “Valentine”, a teenage girl sits on the ground early one morning, ramrod straight. Afraid to make a sound.

It’s February 1976, and Odessa, Texas, is near the cusp of the next great oil boom. While the town’s men embrace the coming prosperity, its women intimately know and fear the violence that always seems to follow.

It is the early hours of the morning after Valentine’s Day. Fourteen-year-old Gloria Ramírez is on the front porch of Mary Rose Whitehead’s ranch house. She is barely alive. She’d been viciously attacked in a nearby oil field.

This is an act of brutality that is tried in the churches and barrooms of Odessa before it ever reaches a court of law. When justice is evasive, the stage is set for a showdown with potentially devastating consequences.

Sleeping nearby in his truck is the boy who repeatedly raped her the night before. She got into his car at Sonic the night before because he seemed so nice.

She went willingly. And wonders if she deserves what happened.

It is February 15, 1976, the day after Valentine’s Day, in Odessa, Texas—a town on the cusp of the next great oil boom.

Gloria:

This is a story about discrimination. It is about how a white boy can rape a Mexican girl, and everyone blames her. Declares she’s trying to sully his fine reputation. Isn’t that something we’ve heard before in our lifetimes?

It is about the townspeople and a woman rooting for her. The rest are assuming she’s just a worthless tart—a Mexican.

When Gloria finally gets the courage to make her way to a distant farmhouse porch, the woman who appears at the door is Mary Rose.

My Thoughts:

This story explores all the ways that females are treated differently from men. Whites are treated differently from non-whites.

The plot bounces back and forth among various town residents, their lives, and how they intersect with this girl no one but Mary Ann has even seen.

It is a well-written and tightly crafted book. The author’s approach to writing is concise and stark. In much the same way, the violent act against Gloria was raw and coarse.

The author delves deeply into her characters. You feel like you could walk up, take them by the hand, and sit down for an iced tea on their front porch. The delicious minutiae of the characters’ lives are what make this book remarkable.

If you like well-crafted characters that weave in and out of the story, rooted in place as the windy, dusty town is, then you will like this book.

This book is about what happened to Gloria. But it is also about particular residents of the town the author paints in broad, colorful strokes. Making them appear as real as your next-door neighbor.

Mercy is hard in a place like this . . .

About The Author:

Before devoting herself to writing, Elizabeth variously tended bar, taught English, drove a cab, and edited psychology dissertations. She painted silos and cooling towers at a petrochemical plant.

For a time, she lived in a one-room cabin in the woods outside Flagstaff, Arizona, while working as a classical music announcer.

A native of West Texas, she is most at home in the desert, near the sea, or on the side of a mountain. She lives in Chicago, but she dreams of being bi-coastal (Lake Michigan and Lake Travis).